failing at life fucking join the club

The belief that you can hear the universe talking to you if you're quiet enough, the aurora being playful kids' souls, women's beauty tattoos, the concept of teasing cousins, all neat little details that would fit in the worldbuilding.

Maybe there could have been a scene where Sokka's burrying something near the roots of a tree and Aang is asking him what he's doing, so Sokka explains that it's the guts and bones from his kill the other night. He has to use all parts of the animal, or it offends the spirits and the game makes itself scarce. They aren't able to do anything with the leftovers before they go bad, so he'll give them to the trees, which will grow strong and give more animals places to hide. And then Aang walks away from that and doesn't flinch when Sokka mentions hunting, because he knows he isn't throwing away life, just borrowing it.

Who are the Uighurs?

The Uighurs are mostly Muslims, and number about 11 million in western China’s Xinjiang region. They see themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations, and their language is similar to Turkish.

But in recent decades, there’s been a mass migration of Han Chinese (China’s ethnic majority) to Xinjiang, and the Uighurs feel their culture and livelihoods are under threat.

Nowhere in the world, not even in North Korea, is the population monitored as strictly as it is in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.  Oppression has been in place for years, but has worsened massively in recent months.

- Uighurs can no longer openly practice Islam

- Men are not allowed to wear beards. Exception only for old people

- They can no longer learn their native language at school

- They cannot move freely around the country and cannot leave it

- All mosques have been turned into shops and office centers

Beijing has also turned Xinjiang into a security state that is extreme even by China’s standards, being a police state itself. The provincial government has recruited over 90,000 police officers in the last two years alone - twice as many as it recruited in the previous seven years. 

At the same time, Beijing is equipping the far-western region with state-of-the-art surveillance technology, with cameras illuminating every street all over the region, from the capital Urumqi to the most remote mountain village. Iris scanners and WiFi sniffers are in use in stations, airports and at the ubiquitous checkpoints - tools and programs that allow data traffic from wireless networks to be monitored.

Checkpoints are installed in every district of the city. In simple terms, you can not get from one area of the city to another without passing the checkpoint and the police.

The data is then collated by an “integrated joint operations platform” that also stores further data on the populace – from consumer habits to banking activity, health status and indeed the DNA profile of every single inhabitant of Xinjiang.

Anyone with a potentially suspicious data trail can be detained. The government has built up a grid of hundreds of re-education camps. Tens of thousands of people have disappeared into them in recent months.

“Qu xuexi,” meaning to go or be sent to study, is one of the most common expressions in Xinjiang these days. It is a euphemism for having been taken away and not having been seen or heard from since. The “schools” are re-education centers in which the detainees are being forced to take courses in Chinese and patriotism, without any indictment, due process or a fair hearing.

Xinjiang, one of the most remote and backward regions in booming China, has become a real-life dystopia. It provides a glimpse of what an authoritarian regime armed with 21st century technology is capable of.

Uighurs are very intimidated and refuse to talk to the press, even if they miraculously escaped the country. 

What’s happening in China is terrible. Maybe some people finally realize that the concentration camps are the reality of our time. There are concentration camps in America too. Don’t forget that. 

source 

If you’d rather listen to a basic outline of the problem, here’s a very well done conversation piece from Chris Hayes’s podcast, Why is This Happening.

“Oh yeah, every time that dad forgets mom is dead, we head to the cemetery so he can see her gravestone.”

WHAT. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard some version of this awful story. Stop taking people with dementia to the cemetery. Seriously. I cringe every single time someone tells me about their “plan” to remind a loved one that their loved one is dead.

I also hear this a lot: “I keep reminding mom that her sister is dead, and sometimes she recalls it once I’ve said it.” That’s still not a good thing. Why are we trying to force people to remember that their loved ones have passed away?

If your loved one with dementia has lost track of their timeline, and forgotten that a loved one is dead, don’t remind them. What’s the point of reintroducing that kind of pain? Here’s the thing: they will forget again, and they will ask again. You’re never, ever, ever, going to “convince” them of something permanently. 

Instead, do this:

“Dad, where do you think mom is?”

When he tells you the answer, repeat that answer to him and assert that it sounds correct. For example, if he says, “I think mom is at work,” say, “Yes, that sounds right, I think she must be at work.” If he says, “I think she passed away,” say, “Yes, she passed away.” 

So finally one day Alice did the whole “JANET IS HERE” and this nurse rather nastily went “Janet is dead” and before it could go any further I said “excuse me??? How dare you say something so horrible to my sister?”

The nurse was pissed, because I was “feeding Alice’s delusions.” Alice didn’t have delusions. Alice had Alzheimer’s.

But I made sure it went into Alice’s chart that she responded positively to being allowed to believe I was Janet. And from that point forward, only my specific patient referred to me as “Nina” in front of Alice—everyone else called me Janet, and when Alice said my name wasn’t Nina I just said “oh, it’s a nickname, that’s all.” It kept her calm and happy and not sobbing every time she saw me.

Always remembered that, always did it. Nothing worse than hearing someone with memory loss ask the same question over and over again only to be met with: “We already told you!”

Please never do any variety of the “game” my ex-aunt (I have disowned her for a number of reasons and no longer recognize her as family) used to do to my grandma.

Grandma would be happily sitting with us all at the table in the nursing home cafeteria - cheerful, focused intensely on eating a piece of pumpkin pie with a straw -, and then my ex-aunt would get this malicious little smile and say.  “Hey, who do you think that is?” and point at my dad.  “Who’s that sitting beside you?”

My grandmother would look at him, head bobbling a bit as she task-switched from sucking the end of the straw she’d been spearing into the pie and study my dad.  Then she’d smile a bit and say her long-dead brother’s name.

And my ex-aunt, that rotten bitch, would chuckle, “No, that’s [my dad’s name].   That’s your son.”  Then she’d go around the table pointing at people and asking my grandma to identify them, and correct her when she got it wrong.

Every single time she did this, gleeful like a kid pulling the wings off a butterfly because now she could “get back” at her mother for a life of “slights”, I tried to stop it, interrupt, talk to grandma to get her to focus on me, loudly bring up another subject, even tried to physically put myself between them or wheel her chair away, but my aunt was undaunted and would just carry on. 

And every time, I had to watch my grandma live through a horror movie as she realized the people surrounding her, people she thought she knew, family and friends, loved one’s she’d grown up with, weren’t those people.  They were someone else.  Someone she didn’t know, didn’t remember.  Strangers with faces she thought she knew.

The look on her face. 

How quiet she’d be before the haze of forgetfulness took the horror away.

It never, ever mattered to me that she forgot the whole thing in a few minutes, watching someone go from happy and festive because there’s pie on a crinkly plastic tablecloth with pumpkins and turkeys and the whole family is here! :), to literally the middle of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers was awful.

the fight against climate change is not “for the future” or “coming up”

no. it is now. for california, for me, for the 37 fucking million of us who live here, it is now. it is now. it is fucking now. there is smoke blanketing my entire city. the other day there was ASH FALLING FROM THE SKY. there are people who are living with red, terrifying smoke, right outside their front doors. i can’t open a window because it all smells like a fucking fire. the sky is entirely grey, because it’s all fucking smoke. my entire fucking STATE is affected by this shit. my STATE.

by the way, california? our population is 71% of England’s. an entire country.

and yes, there are issues other than climate change that have caused this shit, of course. but I’ve grown up through two droughts. I’ve watched the fountains in my town get shut down, I’ve watched them grow dusty and old. I’ve fixed my sprinklers to account for the new water restrictions. I’ve grown up knowing each winter was colder, each summer hotter. I’ve grown up seeing this shit.

every year, we come to fire season, and i hope and watch and desperately wish that it’ll be okay. that thousands of people won’t lose their homes this year. that i won’t have to walk home with a red sun blazing over me and smoke so thick i can’t stop coughing. that I’ll be able to step outside and not smell it. that people won’t lose their towns, their belongings, their livelihoods. every damn year.

my entire state is kindling. my friends outside of cali reach out to me about the fires, telling me they hope I’ll be safe. but i can’t go outside without inhaling lungfuls of smoke. i can’t do anything but watch as hundreds of thousands of acres burn.

2.5 million acres have burned this year. million. 2.5 fucking million acres. 20x what burned last year.

my state is on fire. my city is covered in smoke. a one year old boy DIED because of these fires, and who knows how many will join him by the time this is over.

so yes, please, donate. but i am tired as shit of people pretending that wildfires in california should be normal, that this is okay, that this is just “something that happens” no. no. vote for politicians who support renewable energy. vote for politicians who care about climate change. because, in the grand scheme of things, what we need is restrictions and laws and regulations. one person installing solar panels isn’t going to do shit.

those bottom photos are san francisco. my state is burning.

That record was beaten in 2017 by the Thomas Fire.

Then it was beaten again in 2018 by the Mendocino Complex Fire.

Then it was beaten again three times over by the LNU Lightning Complex Fire, the SCU Lightning Complex Fire, and the August Complex Fire all in August of this year, 2020.

A record for largest wildfire ever that had been held for 14 years was beaten five times over in the span of not even a full 4 years. This is not fucking normal.

Growing up, I knew about fire season. I lived in an extremely fire prone area, so I was no stranger to the smell of smoke in the air, getting prepared to evacuate, watching the news with flames dancing across the screen. But it never happened every single year. Our fire season used to be September - November. Now, since 2017, fire season has started sooner and sooner, and now most people would say it begins in July.

In the past two days I've read dozens of stories of students who aced their mocks and coursework, who had predicted grades of As and A*s, only to be given Ds and Es because of where the school is. I've read dozens of stories of deserving pupils losing their places at prestigious universities because their grades are too low.

Rest assured this algorithm had no ill effect on private schools, which were in some cases awarding their students significantly higher results than their prior grades indicated.

This action by the UK government is seriously flawed and will hurt many many young people who are in low income postal codes.

To use an algorithm to determine grades based on location is unethical and morally wrong.

If I lived in the UK I would be all over the Tory government to clean up their act. Clearly this is an excellent example of class exclusion that the UK is so known for in the past and still continues to use today.